Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

rattlesnakes, tetanus, polio, how thoughtless, how could we have—? Peter, who had an unpredictable temper, was so infuriated by having the thrust of our insurrection deflected that a few minutes later, when the two governesses lined us up on the embankment in front of some oak trees for a group snapshot, he lunged forward and bit ours (a relief nurse who was substituting on Emily’s day off) on the leg, sinking his teeth in and drawing blood. She squealed and almost fell into the gulch behind her.

While the rest of us engineered these pranks with a heady life-or-death spirit, merrily devoting all our creative—and what we thought of as brilliant—energy to them, Bridget remained on the outside, hovering, bemused. Jane Fonda remembers her as being “slightly on the edge of things. Just sort of never in the center of the action. I’ve known several children who have leukemia, young, eleven- or twelve-year-olds, and know they’re dying—there’s something very different about them. First of all, they look different. There is a kind of pale, translucent quality about them but they seem extremely mature. They’re not silly and they don’t rough-house the way other kids do, and Bridget was something like that.”

To me, at that time, Bridget was becoming very irritating. Since I was older and usually the only one of us able to do it, it was my responsibility to talk her into being a part of any group activity; in my more dispassionate moments I was capable of understanding her reticence, but in the heat of the fray it made me impatient, and if she became stubborn, flatly refusing to enter a game that we couldn’t play without another person—or, worse, threatening to tell on the rest of us if she was apprehensive about one of our daredevil schemes—I couldn’t stand it. What exasperated me most was trying to figure out why, if she put up so much resistance that we would finally decide to go ahead without her, she would then stick out her lower lip, scrunch up her face, and burst into tears. Everything would come to a standstill when one of us—generally me—went to find a referee like Mother or Emily. Bridget would refuse to budge, sobbing that it was nobody else’s business and besides she didn’t want to be singled out to a grownup as not fitting in. “But, Bridget,” Mother would comfort her, trying to make her laugh by rubbing their noses together, “you must always come to me if you’re unhappy—at least that way I can help you, silly.” And Bridget would whimper that that would make her feel like a tattletale and it wasn’t our fault and she couldn’t explain what the matter was, anyway. “Now, children, surely you can all play nicely together, there’s room for everyone,” Mother would admonish us. “But, Mother, that’s the whole point, she doesn’t want to play—do you, Bridget?” Bridget would remain silent and for Mother’s sake sulkily rejoin us, occasionally getting caught up in whatever we were doing enough to enjoy herself. As time went on and she took Mother’s advice, however, her behavior grew more frustrating; she would burst into tears and scuttle off at the drop of a hat to inform Mother we were being mean to her. “Crybaby, crybaby,” we would run back and forth shouting harder and harder. Mother would storm after us to lecture us about being bullies, we would defend our side of the situation to Mother, and Mother would soothe Bridget. “If you were really smart, my darling Brie, you would just ignore them, go your own way and not give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can make you cry. If you behave as if they’re not upsetting you—I’ll tell you a secret—they won’t try to bother you any more. That’s human nature.” And Bridget would stalk around humming to herself, pretending we were invisible so that we would have to proceed without her anyway.

She was still small and skinny—“the runt of the family,” Mother teased her affectionately—and everything about her coloring was so pale, her skin, her hair, her eyelashes and brows, that once she asked Mother if she might be an albino, and Mother said of course not, if that were so her eyes would have been pink instead of blue. Still, she gave the impression of being frail and sickly, so that whenever we went to the doctor for a checkup, Mother had her tested for anemia, but it always turned out that, except for her sensitive skin, she was healthier than Bill and I, who were in bed a lot with bronchitis and ear infections. “You see?” Mother assured her. “Appearances mean nothing. Don’t let them boss you around any more; you’re really much stronger than either of them.”

As long as Bridget was alone with Bill and me, she seemed happiest, as if, making all allowances for daily warfare, we were the underpinnings of her security. At least with us, she thought she knew exactly where she was: sandwiched halfway between us in age and size and able to predict, more or less, what effect her behavior would have on us emotionally. It wasn’t a case of her being dependent on us, because although she was, she was also very much her own person, but the one thing about her that nobody—not even she—could measure or value was the extent of her originality. She looked different, she was different, she knew she was different, and that meant different from Bill and me, a comparison heightened by the knowledge that to begin with, the three of us were all different from other children. And no matter what Mother said, we weren’t at all sure that different meant better when events seemed to contradict that concept—as, in fact, did Mother herself at times when she would expound at length on the importance of our leading “normal everyday lives” like other people. It was confusing. Bridget constantly forced herself—or was forced by our example—to contend